Standardizing processes is a key strategy to improve efficiency, quality, and consistency in your business services. However, you also need to be flexible enough to adapt to changing customer needs, market conditions, and innovation opportunities. How can you balance these two goals and create a dynamic and responsive process improvement culture? Here are some tips to help you.
Not all parts of your processes are equally important or rigid. Some are core elements that define your value proposition, quality standards, and compliance requirements. These are the ones you want to standardize and document as much as possible. Others are variable elements that depend on the context, preferences, and feedback of your customers and stakeholders. These are the ones you want to leave some room for customization and experimentation. By distinguishing between core and variable elements, you can focus your standardization efforts on what matters most and allow for flexibility where it adds value.
The 5 steps of CVM is a highly useful method to standardize processes while remaining flexible and attentive to customer needs: 1. Identify customers' abnormal behaviors, like early high-value customer churn. 2. Understand these customer journeys in depth. 3. Generalize to determine if issues are isolated or widespread. 4. Test with experiments for rapid, impactful changes. 5. Scale up effective strategies. By iterative repetition of these 5 steps, organizations can optimize their customers' experience and add value to their products/ services. I find it particularly beneficial for mature organizations facing growth-related challenges like over-bureaucracy and a disconnect from customer needs.
Standardizing processes does not mean setting them in stone. You need to constantly monitor, evaluate, and improve your processes based on data and feedback. One way to do this is to use agile and iterative methods, such as Scrum, Kanban, or Lean, that enable you to break down your processes into smaller and manageable chunks, deliver value quickly and frequently, and incorporate changes and improvements along the way. By using agile and iterative methods, you can standardize your process framework and principles, but still be flexible enough to adjust and optimize your process outcomes.
Your team is the key to achieving both standardization and flexibility in your processes. You need to train, equip, and empower them to follow the established standards, but also to exercise their judgment, creativity, and initiative when needed. You can do this by creating a culture of trust, collaboration, and learning, where your team members can share their ideas, suggestions, and feedback, and where they can learn from their successes and failures. By empowering your team, you can foster a sense of ownership, accountability, and innovation in your processes.
Technology can be a powerful ally in your quest to standardize and streamline your processes, while also enabling flexibility and adaptability. You can use tools and software to automate and integrate your processes, such as workflow management, CRM, ERP, or BI systems, that can help you reduce errors, save time, and improve visibility and communication. However, you also need to be careful not to over-automate or over-integrate your processes, as this can create rigidity, complexity, and dependency. You need to balance the benefits of automation and integration with the costs and risks, and always keep the human factor in mind.
In my experience automation is a great enabler. Use it to get rid of the boring repetitive task, which then allows your team to focus on the actual task at hand. You don't need an analyst to tell you something is going wrong, your security tooling is already doing that. What you need is someone telling why it's happening and assisting in resolving it. Don't think of automation as replacement for your people but as augmentation of type that frees them up to be more creative and fluid. Also document it, when it breaks you know where to start rebuilding.
The final tip to standardize your processes while remaining flexible is to seek feedback and improvement from your customers, stakeholders, and peers. You need to listen to their needs, expectations, and satisfaction, and use their input to refine and enhance your processes. You also need to benchmark your processes against best practices, industry standards, and competitors, and learn from their examples and experiences. By seeking feedback and improvement, you can ensure that your processes are aligned with your goals, values, and market demands, and that they are constantly evolving and improving.